Video surveillance systems are used in a variety of applications to detect and monitor objects within an environment. For example, in security applications, such systems are sometimes employed to detect and track individuals or vehicles entering or leaving a building facility or security gate, or to monitor individuals within a store, office building, hospital, or other such setting where the health and/or safety of the occupants may be of concern. A further example is the aviation industry, where such systems have been used to detect the presence of individuals at key locations within an airport such as at a security gate or in a parking garage. Yet another example of video surveillance is the placement of video sensors in areas of large crowds to monitor crowd behavior. Also, video surveillance may use a network of cameras that cover, for example, a parking lot, a hospital, or a bank.
In recent years, video surveillance systems have progressed from simple human monitoring of a video scene to automatic monitoring of digital images by a processor. In such a system, a video camera or other sensor captures real time video images, and the surveillance system executes an image processing algorithm. The image processing algorithm may include motion detection, motion tracking, and object classification.
While motion detection, motion tracking, and object classification have become somewhat commonplace in the art of video surveillance, and are currently applied to many situations including crowd surveillance, current technology does not include systems having intelligence to deduce and/or predict the intent of an interaction between two or more subjects in a video scene based on visual observation alone. For example, current technology does not provide the ability to determine and/or interpret the intent or actions of people in a video scene (e.g., whether two or more persons in a video sequence are involved in a fight, engaged in a conversation, or involved in some other activity). The current state of the art does not enable such detection for at least the reason that when two people fight, current video motion detection systems only detect one blob, from which the intent of the two subjects cannot be determined.
The art is therefore in need of a video surveillance system that goes beyond simple motion detection, motion tracking, and object classification, and intelligently determines the motive and/or intent of people in a video scene.